Chapter 4
Conduit Runner
Fingers clawed alloy. Kael's shoulder slammed into the conduit housing with a crack he felt in his molars. The drake-wing shredded, canvas ribbons whipping into the void. He dangled from a maintenance hatch by one hand, boots skating empty air, as Inthrall's seraphim streaked past above like comets with a grudge.
Altitude 7,200 metres. Structural grip failing.
"Noted," he grunted, hauling himself into a service tube barely wide enough for his shoulders. Behind him, the terrace edge glowed with ascending search-lances. They'd find him in seconds.
A shadow occluded the opening. Ithriel.
His hand found the gauntlet's pulse-caster. "Come to finish the job?"
She dropped something instead—a compact grav-anchor that mag-locked to the tube interior. "Hold that," she said, voice clipped. "Strategos will execute me for this."
"Why risk it?"
Her gaze flicked to the gauntlet. "Because Vespera was right about one thing. The planes are drowning." She sealed the hatch, cutting the light. "And you're the only buoy."
Darkness swallowed them. The tube shuddered as seraphic scans swept past, blind to their heat signatures now masked by Ithriel's field-canceller.
Sensors indicate lateral transit shaft 4.3 metres ahead. Direction: Skyrealm infrastructural core.
"Lead on," Kael whispered.
They crawled through a cathedral of pipes where coolant sang like choirs and data-streams painted ghost-constellations on the alloy walls. After an age, the shaft opened onto a gantry overlooking a spherical chamber half a kilometre across—a gravity furnace where Skyrealm's cities drew their lift.
At its heart floated the second Nexus Spire. Not dormant. Conscious.
It pulsed with hostile code, wrapped in seraphic kill-wards.
Vespera's laughter echoed from the chamber walls. "Two down, courier."
Kael spun. The Fallen Archon wasn't behind them—she was in the spire's lattice, her corruption rewriting its architecture in real-time.
Alert: Spire Two compromised. Alignment impossible under current parameters.
Ithriel's lance ignited. "Then we purge it."
The chamber alarms shrieked. The furnace woke.
End of Chapter 4